An Island of the Sea. Descriptive of the Past and Present of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies. With a Few Short Stories about Bluebeard's and Blackbeard's Castles.

FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. Tall 8vo. (23 x 15 cm). pp.120+[6, ads]. Publisher's original blue cloth over bevelled boards, spine and front board lettered and decorated in gilt, decorative patterned endpapers, all edges gilt. Signed by the author in a neat and cursive hand on the flyleaf: "With kind regards and best wishes from Charles E. Taylor". Half-tone photographic frontispiece and 20 plates. Some light rubbing along extremities, toning to title-page, generally a very good copy. Charles Taylor was "a highly talented and adventurous Englishman, a scholarly and widely read physician, who lived in the Virgin Islands (then owned by Denmark) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A humanitarian and something of an iconoclast, he has a reputation in the islands for ignoring class and racial divisions in his practice of medicine" (Green, p. 57). He also participated in island government, which was perhaps how he came into regular contact with traders such as Fechtenburg. The former Danish Colony was sold for $25 million in gold to the United States of America during the First World War, after 50 years of preliminary negotiations and draft treatises between the two states; a deal without much of a ripple effect at the time, after a referendum in Denmark had approved the deal. Reference: James W. Green, "Review of Leaflets from the Danish West Indies", The Journal of African American History, vol. 57, no. 1, 1972.…